Internet Archive Online BookReader Usage

At our recent Books in Browsers 2010 event Brewster Kahle and Michael Ang gave a great presentation on the future of the BookReader.

Michael just showed us some stats that are being gathered on BookReader usage. We’re excited to have this first in-depth look at how books are being read in the BookReader.  We hope to see use of our books grow as we continue to improve the BookReader and make it easier to read and share our books online.

The stats count the number of times the BookReader was opened by a web browser (this should exclude most bots).  So far we’ve collected stats for most of October.

Here are some stats:
* Books were opened/read more than 1,500,000 times in October.
* We had approximately 19,000-25,000 unique readers per day.
* 225,000 different books were accessed in the month – a surprisingly wide range of our material is being accessed.
* The average number of books accessed per person each day was 2.5.
* The top book was the New Testament (http://www.archive.org/stream/newtestamentfor01alfogoog) with 2,394 reads.
* The top book accounted for only 0.16% of the total reads, and the top ten together were 0.87% – we have mostly “long tail” access.
* 83% of our users are on Windows – only 54% of those are using Internet Explorer.
* 34% of our users use Firefox.

Bottom line is, there are lot of books being read and they are of a wide variety. We hope to see use of our books grow as we continue to improve the BookReader and make it easier to read and share our books online.

Spread the word! Thanks to all the users of Internet Archive.

-Jeff Kaplan

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  1. Pingback: Internet Archive Book Reader (try search) | RDSchumacher CIO, MBA, PMP

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